By Victoria Arnold, Forum 18 News Service Over four months between May and August, 37 cases were brought to punish individuals and religious communities across Russia for exercising freedom of religion or belief in public spaces under Administrative Code Article 20.2, Forum 18 News Service has found. One community was…

Rights in Russia Week-ending Friday 30 October 2015 Returning the Names Stalinism On 29/10, in an event on Lubyanka Square. 'Returning the Names', members of the public honoured the memory of those executed during the Great Terror. (RFE/RL, 29/10) GULAG museum On 30/10 a new state-run museum on the history…

"I decided to take the conversation to a slightly different level," journalist Oleg Kashin says about his decision to publish A Letter To The Leaders Of The Russian Federation. By Carl Schreck October 06, 2015 In 1973, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn sent a letter to…

September 29, 2015 (JTA) — A senior Russian rabbi condemned the government’s listing of a Jewish welfare group as a foreign agent, calling it part of a policy which is making Jews insecure of their future in Russia. Boruch Gorin, a Chabad rabbi who acts as a senior aide to Russian Chief…

(JTA) — Russia’s Justice Ministry placed a Jewish cultural association with ties to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee on its list of nongovernmental organizations defined as “foreign agents.” The Hesed-Tshuva group, which is based in the city of Ryazan located 120 miles south of Moscow, was placed on the list…

By GRAHAM BOWLEY In a decision likely to prolong a Russian ban on lending art to American museums, a federal judge on Thursdayordered Russia to pay a fine of $43.7 million for refusing to return a collection of Jewish books and documents to the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch group. The dispute, long a…

Rights in Russia: Week-ending 19 June 2015 [see also as attachment] HRO.org in English On the harassment of the Dynasty Foundation in Russia Lawyer Ivan Pavlov: military losses in peacetime cannot be state secret Committee Against Torture to renew work from former apartment of Natalya Estemirova General Prosecutor's Office unable to…

Below is a copy of the statement Ambassador Ian Kelly delivered to the Permanent Council in Vienna on July 4, 2013 regarding the six month suspension of Golos, a major independent election monitoring NGO. As delivered by Ambassador Ian Kelly Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The United States is deeply concerned…

On May 22nd, The Moscow Times reported on the inevitability of a guilty verdict for Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader who is facing a sentencing for fraud. This is because only 1 percent of verdicts passed in Russia are not guilty, according to official statistics. Navalny's conviction could put him…